Two examples of this tendency jumped out at me recently. The first was in one of the conversations about prospects for 2014 and the future generally on NPR. This one was "What Does the Future Hold for Climate Change." Host Steve Inskeep interviewed Andrew Steer of the World Resources Institute. Steer was putting forward the Consumer Goods Forum as a hopeful sign--a group of companies that want to be "the good guys" and reduce carbon, not buy tropical oils that lead to deforestation, etc. He said they were responding to customers who "increasingly want them to do the right thing." Then this exchange took place:
INSKEEP: It's the image thing. It's public relations.
STEER: Well, almost so because - so the moral thing. I mean the reason that I recycle is not for my image. It's because I actually think it's the right thing to do.
Giving Inskeep his due, he was probably talking about the motivation of the companies, and he's probably right to be cynical in assuming they're responding to customer pressure for p.r. purposes. But Steer makes the right distinction. The reason is not public relations, it's moral. And that's the important distinction. If the commitment isn't moral, it won't be real--even if Steer had to explain that somebody could do something because "I actually think it's the right thing to do." So advocates can't be talking about companies improving their image. They must keep to the correct category: the morality of destroying the Earth and the human future.
On a different subject, Michael Wolff in the Guardian reports on the New York Times effort to keep competitive on the Internet by including "native advertising"--those weird ads and "links" that are actually advertising. Their quality is usually that of the kind of ads you used to find in the back of sleazy magazines. Now they're on virtually every Internet site. The Times is going to include them, Wolff says, but in ways that separate them from editorial content.
Wolff (not always the most reliable of reporters) seems pretty astute on the clash of advertising models on the Internet vs. print, but he goes frothing at the mouth haywire asserting that newspapers and magazine that insist on a distinction between editorial content and advertising are doing so because they are elitist. The easy-entry, click-happy Internet threatens the Times ability to '"demonstrate its quality bona fides or cast its snobbish spell."
But the issues aren't elitism or snobbery, however potent they may be in even an Internet outlet's appeal. They are the independence of the editorial voice, and readers' confidence that they know who is talking--is it the Times, or is it an advertiser with its agenda?
The threat of advertising encroaching on editorial independence and on the clear difference for readers of editorial content and paid-for advertising content has been ongoing in print and broadcast media for at least my quasi-adult lifetime. The Internet is already swamped with dubious information, dominated by sensationalism and cheap momentary emotions, as well as by complete fraud. With a few exceptions, the only semi-reliable news comes from the Internet sites of established print and broadcast news organizations that at least try to take journalistic ethics seriously. But starting with the native ads cluttering up the page and insulting you, and the links that may lead to a real story by that publication or far afield to another site where you get cookied and possibly virused, these outlets too are becoming distressingly less reliable. (And the popup ads etc. make them very discouraging.) The situation is going to continue getting worse especially if people can't frame the issues correctly, but fall back on fashionable business-based cynicism.
Both of these category "mistakes" have a couple of things in common. They favor corporate, B-school fashionable concepts instead of older principle-based ones that apparently have to be dredged shamefaced out of the forgotten deep. And these "mistakes" have something in common with a broader one expressed by the Canadian Native writer Thomas King. He relates (in verse) a Coyote story in which Coyote is tricked by Weasel into tying his tail in a knot so tightly that it fall off, because Weasel convinced him it was the key to being able to whistle well.
King concludes: "Elwood told that story to the Rotary Club in town/and everyone laughed and said what a stupid Coyote./ And that's the problem, you know,/seeing the difference between stupidity/and greed."
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